Dakuten and handakuten


The dakuten, colloquially, is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a mora should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku.
The handakuten, colloquially, is a diacritic used with kana for morae pronounced with or to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with.

Glyphs

The dakuten resembles a quotation mark, while the handakuten is a small circle, similar to a degree sign, both placed at the top right corner of a kana character:
Both the dakuten and handakuten glyphs are drawn identically in hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible dakuten and handakuten character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width kana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte.
The similarity between the dakuten and quotation marks is not a problem, as written Japanese uses corner brackets.

Phonetic shifts

The following table summarizes the phonetic shifts indicated by the dakuten and handakuten. Literally, morae with dakuten are "muddy sounds", while those without are "clear sounds". However, the handakuten does not follow this pattern.
-DakutenHandakuten
か kaが ga
さ saざ za
た taだ da
は haば baぱ pa
ら ra
わ wa

Handakuten on ka, ki, ku, ke, ko represent the sound of ng in singing, which is an allophone of in many dialects of Japanese. They are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used by linguists and in dictionaries. This is called . Another rare application of handakuten is on the r-series, to mark them as explicitly l: ラ゚, and so forth. This is only done in technical or pedantic contexts, as many Japanese speakers cannot tell the difference between r and l. Additionally, linguists sometimes use ウ゚ to represent in cases when speaker pronounces う at the beginning of a word as a moraic nasal.
In katakana only, the dakuten may also be added to the character ウ u and a small vowel character to create a sound, as in ヴァ va. However, a hiragana version of this character also exists, with somewhat sporadic compatibility across platforms. As does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as ビーナス instead of ヴィーナス. Japanese speakers, however, pronounce both the same, with or, an occasional allophone of intervocalic.
An even less common method is to add dakuten to the w-series, reviving the mostly obsolete characters for and . is represented by using /u/, as above; becomes despite its normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well, although most IMEs do not have a convenient way to enter them.
In Ainu texts, handakuten can be used with the katakana セ to make it a /t͡s/ sound, セ゚ ce , and is used with small fu to represent a final p, ㇷ゚. In addition, handakuten can be combined with either katakana ツ or ト to make a sound, ツ゚ or ト゚.
In Miyakoan, handakuten can be used with イ to represent the vowel.
In informal writing, dakuten is occasionally used on vowels to indicate a shocked or strangled articulation; for example, on あ゙ or ゔ. Dakuten can also be occasionally used with ん to indicate a guttural hum, growl, or similar sound.

Kana iteration marks

The dakuten can also be added to hiragana and katakana iteration marks, indicating that the previous kana is repeated with voicing:
Type-Dakuten
Hiraganaゝゞ
Katakanaヽヾ

Both signs are relatively rare, but can occasionally be found in personal names such as Misuzu or brand names such as Isuzu. In these cases the pronunciation is identical to writing the kana out in full. A longer, multi-character iteration mark called the kunojiten, only used in vertical writing, may also have a dakuten added.

Other communicative representations

  • Representations of Dakuten
  • Representations of Handakuten
Voiced morae and semi-voiced morae do not have independent names in radiotelephony and are signified by the unvoiced name followed by "ni dakuten" or "ni handakuten".
  • Full Braille representation

    Origins

The kun'yomi pronunciation of the character is nigori; hence the dakuten may also be called the nigori-ten. This character, meaning "muddy", stems from historical Chinese phonology, where consonants were traditionally classified as "fully clear", "partly clear", "fully muddy" and "partly muddy" . Unlike in Chinese where "clear" and "muddy" were phonological, in Japanese, these terms are purely orthographic: a "muddy sound" is simply a kana with a "muddy mark", or a dakuten; a "partly clear" or "half muddy sound" is simply a kana with a "half muddy mark", or a handakuten; a "clear sound" is any other kana without either of these marks. In fact, the "partly clear/half muddy" consonant in Japanese would be considered "fully clear" in Chinese, while "clear" Japanese consonants such as,,, and would be "partly muddy" in Chinese. Meiji-era descriptions of the Japanese "sound" system in terms of "clear" and "muddy" always referenced the kana spelling and the two diacritics dakuten and handakuten. There is a distinction between "base muddiness" where a morpheme inherently contains a voiced consonant, and "new muddiness" where a morpheme loses its original voiceless consonant and gains a voiced counterpart through rendaku.
The earliest attested use of "muddy" diacritics was from the late ninth century. One of such diacritics was a superscript version of the radical 氵 from the "muddy" character 濁, as in 婆. The modern dakuten appears to have come from Chinese tone diacritics. In some documents, one dot marked pitch on a "clear sound," while two dots marked pitch on a "muddy sound." Another source was the Siddhaṃ nasality diacritic anusvāra through Buddhist sources. In Japanese writing, it was adapted into a dot placed at the top-right corner of a character to denote the "muddiness" or nasality of consonants, as well as of the nasalized vowels and  adapted from the Chinese. The use of the anusvāra suggests prenasalization in early voiced consonants.
The handakuten is an innovation by Portuguese Jesuits, who first used it in the Rakuyōshū, to accurately transcribe the consonant and its lenited form, which had not been distinguished in domestic writing.